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Figure out what you need to do to be the heroine of your own story.

Ava DuVernay

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Ava DuVernay
Age: 52
Born: 1972
Born: August 24
Film Director
Film Producer
Filmmaker
Screenwriter
Showrunner
Television Producer
Writer
Long Beach
California
Ava Marie DuVernay
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Story
Stories
Need
Needs
Heroine
Heroines
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More quotes by Ava DuVernay

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I'm a huge Dirty Dancing fan. I feel like I should be reading [William] Shakespeare, but I'm watching Baby not be in a corner.
Ava DuVernay
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It sounds kind of flighty, filmmaker-y, but I believe films are a piece of art. They are meant to be what they're meant to be, and sometimes the artist is informed by the film of what it needs to be.
Ava DuVernay
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Don't wait for permission to do something creative.
Ava DuVernay
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I was talking to Shonda Rhimes the other day and I said, I. Do. Not. Know. How. You. Do. This. While we're writing episode 10, episode 6 is shooting, episode 3 is in the edit, and episode 2 is in its color session...You've got seven episodes in different parts! It's a wild, wild, wild ride, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was badass and amazing
Ava DuVernay
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The traditional ways to make a film, the traditional ways to share a film, have all collapsed. There are no gatekeepers, per se, any more, and anything can be done. Truly, I feel that.
Ava DuVernay
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I'm not the most athletic gal, but because making a movie is very physical, I slow down on the Krispy Kreme and Ice Blendeds. I start to get leaner and more focused - like I'm going into a boxing match - because I'm about to really try to put this idea on its feet.
Ava DuVernay
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[ Hollywood] is a patriarchy, headed by men and built for men.
Ava DuVernay
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There's no reason not to employ, seek out and take a chance on a woman filmmaker that you might not have been looking at her direction. She's not done it before because you've not given her the opportunity to do it before, and I'm just happy that folks like Jessica Jones' Melissa Rosenberg and folks like Ryan Murphy are also embracing this idea.
Ava DuVernay
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I didn't go to film school. I got my education on the set as a niche publicist in the film industry.
Ava DuVernay
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At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.
Ava DuVernay
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I make films about Black women and it doesn't mean that you can't see them as a Black man, doesn't mean that he can't see them as a white man or she can't see them as a white woman.
Ava DuVernay
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The terrain of the face is the most dynamic thing you can point the camera at, to me. I love production design and bells and whistles and all of that. I love a technograin as much as the next gal, but a great actor's face? What else should we be looking at?
Ava DuVernay
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These are dark times for a lot of people who believe differently than our incoming administration [of Donald Trump], but there's also joy there, and there's also something in unifying around the things that we do believe in.
Ava DuVernay
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The fact that's why the prisons and stock in private prisons rose the very day after the election results [for Donald Trump] were announced. The fact that progress that was made for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ people, are all at risk.
Ava DuVernay
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Working full-time as a filmmaker has been a dream come true.
Ava DuVernay
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We have to find new ways to work without permission, new ways to turn corners and go through doors that are closed off to us to create our own audiences and our own material independently.
Ava DuVernay
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Most of us think prison is a place where bad people go - which is what I thought for a long time - until you really start to look inside the system and you see, this is not right.
Ava DuVernay
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Be passionate and move forward with gusto every single hour of every single day until you reach your goal.
Ava DuVernay
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I really admire Werner Herzog and Spike Lee. They're amazing documentarians. If you took away all the narratives, they'd just be amazing documentarians.
Ava DuVernay
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As long as you're in an environment where the worth of the project isn't based on the project but what its predecessors did, it's not truly inclusive.
Ava DuVernay